Advantages

Usage Models

Bare-Metal FPGA Design

If you are looking to develop your FPGA design from scratch, XLR8 gives you a familiar board design form factor. Just add a pin header, fire-up Intel’s Quartus Prime, and use USB Blaster to load your design to the MAX10 though the JTAG port.

OpenXLR8

If you like the idea of keeping XLR8 Arduino-compatible, you can implement your FPGA logic in the form of Xcelerator Blocks and use OpenXLR8 to load them to the FPGA. This gives you the ability to program the MAX10 with your custom functionality across the USB interface on XLR8.

No JTAG and No USB Blaster required!

OpenXLR8

OpenXLR8 is the methodology that allows XLR8 users to create their own custom Xcelerator Blocks and integrate them into the FPGA.

Xcelerator Blocks

What’s an Xcelerator Block?

An Xcelerator Block is an optimized hardware implementation of a unique processor intensive function. Since everything needs a cool acronym, we simply refer to one of these blocks as an “XB”.

XLR8 ships with pre-installed XBs that target application-specific behavior. These are listed on the right. XLR8 can be field-updated to change the XBs implemented on the FPGA. Learn more about XBs on the Xcelerator Blocks page.

Memory

Purchase your XLR8 board today!

The History of XLR8

The XLR8 concept was born as a result of brainstorming ideas for how we could offer the advantages of FPGA processing and acceleration to the Arduino ecosystem. At the same time, one of our own makers was running into some problems with a home project. The rest, as they say, is history.

Here's our Kickstarter video from last fall that tells the story.

Hardware Versions

Rev 1 Prototype

This is the first version of XLR8 that we designed. This board went from concept to hardware in our labs in about two months, and it worked like a champ!

Rev 2

Rev 2 of the XLR8 development board includes level shifting circuitry to provide true 5-volt compatibility for legacy 5V shields. There were also some small mechanical changes and a new color.

Production

The production version of our board includes a new silk screen, some additional test points for automated production testing, and some minor circuit modifications.

Although Arduino is an excellent platform for rapidly and inexpensively building new product designs, it is resource limited. Alorium Technology’s XLR8 board solves this problem in a cost-effective manner by integrating an Arduino compatible processor into an FPGA with custom Xcelerator Blocks that significantly improve Arduino-based projects.

Tom Pomphrey
Dragonfly Software

Purchase your XLR8 board today!

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